Goal: Highly portable (1/3)
Flexible endianness and word size:
Endian: big, little
Word size: ILP32, LP64
All combinations are supported
Some CPU families can be either endian (e.g, mipseb, mipsel, sh3el, sh3eb)
64 bit CPUs can run the 32 bit binaries of the same CPU family
Application binaries of a CPU family run on all architectures in the same family